Senior Staff Engineer - Java (HYBRID)

At GEICO, we offer a rewarding career where your ambitions are met with endless possibilities. Every day we honor our iconic brand by offering quality coverage to millions of customers and being there when they need us most. We thrive through relentless innovation to exceed our customers’ expectations while making a real impact for our company through our shared purpose. When you join our company, we want you to feel valued, supported and proud to work here. That’s why we offer The GEICO Pledge: Great Company, Great Culture, Great Rewards and Great Careers. Position Description Our Senior Staff Engineer works with our Staff and Sr. Engineers to innovate and build new systems, improve and enhance existing systems and identify new opportunities to apply your knowledge to solve critical problems. You will lead the strategy and execution of a technical roadmap that will increase the velocity of delivering products and unlock new engineering capabilities. The ideal candidate is a self-starter that has deep technical expertise in their domain. Position Responsibilities As a Senior Staff Engineer, you will: Provide technical leadership to multiple areas and provide technical and thought leadership to the enterprise Collaborate across team members and across the tech organization to solve our toughest problems Deliver High-Quality services and software for a variety of domains Accountable for the quality, usability, and performance of the solutions Utilize programming languages like Java, C#, or other object-oriented languages, SQL, and NoSQL databases, Container Orchestration services including Docker and Kubernetes, and a variety of Azure/AWS/GCP tools and services Work on End-to-End solutions that may span front-end implementations (Flutter, Agular, React) through API tiers and Back-End domain services. Be a role model and mentor, helping to coach and strengthen the technical expertise and know-how of our engineering and product community. Influence and educate executives Consistently share best practices and improve processes within and across teams Analyze cost and forecast, incorporating them into business plans Determine and support resource requirements, evaluate operational processes, measure outcomes to ensure desired results, and demonstrate adaptability and sponsoring continuous learning Qualifications Exemplary ability to design, perform experiments, and influence engineering direction and product roadmap Experience partnering with engineering teams and transferring research to production Extensive experience in leading and building full-stack application and service development, with a strong focus on SAAS products / platforms. Proven expertise in designing and developing microservices using graphQL, gRPC, Java, Python, Kafka, with a deep understanding of both API and event-driven architectures. Proven experience designing and delivering highly-resilient event-driven and messaging based solutions at scale with minimal latency. Deep hands-on experience in building complex SAAS systems in large scale business focused systems, with great knowledge on Docker and Kubernetes Fluency and Specialization with at least two modern OOP languages such as Java, C#, C++, or Python including object-oriented design Familiarity and comfort with front-end technologies as well as back-end, including technologies like React, Flutter, Angular, Html, Javascript. Great understanding of open-source databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc. And strong foundation with No-SQL databases like Cosmos, Cassandra. Apache Trino etc. In-depth knowledge of CS data structures and algorithms Ability to excel in a fast-paced, startup-like environment Knowledge of developer tooling across the software development life cycle (task management, source code, building, deployment, operations, real-time communication) Experience with Micro-services oriented architecture and extensible REST APIs Experience building the architecture and design (architecture, design patterns, reliability, and scaling) of new and current systems Experience in implementing security protocols across services and products: Understanding of Active Directory, Windows Authentication, SAML, OAuth Fluency in DevOps Concepts, Cloud Architecture, and DevOps Operational Frameworks Experience with application monitoring tools and performance assessments Experience in Azure Network (Subscription, Security zoning, etc.) Experience 12+ years of software engineering, including 3+ years at a Staff / Principal / Architect level with explicit ownership of system-of-record or operational-data-store architecture decisions. Java (deep) — Java 17/21 idioms, JVM performance tuning, profiling streaming workloads, Spring Boot / Spring framework at production scale. Streaming data systems at scale — Apache Kafka (topic design, partitioning, consumer-group semantics, schema registry, exactly-once / at-least-once trade-offs), Kafka Streams or comparable. Apache Flink in production — windowed aggregations, state backends, checkpointing, savepoint upgrades, watermark tuning, side outputs / DLQ patterns. Architected and built real-time master / operational data repositories that are critical to live business processes — i.e., systems that other services depend on for transactional decisions, not analytics layers. Examples: customer master, party / identity store, account / policy operational repository, real-time inventory, real-time pricing, real-time ledger. You can articulate the trade-offs you made on consistency, latency, durability, and replay/recovery. Distributed-systems fundamentals — CAP, partitioning, idempotency, exactly-once edge cases, change-data-capture, schema evolution, blue/green and shadow-traffic cutover patterns. Production storage experience with Cassandra (or comparable wide-column store) or a distributed graph database; understanding of read-vs-write cluster splits. Excellent written design — you write RFCs that other senior engineers reference; you can decompose ambiguous business problems into a sequenced engineering plan with clear gates. Education Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or equivalent education or work experience Annual Salary $100,000.00 - $260,000.00 The above annual salary range is a general guideline. Multiple factors are taken into consideration to arrive at the final hourly rate/ annual salary to be offered to the selected candidate. Factors include, but are not limited to, the scope and responsibilities of the role, the selected candidate’s work experience, education and training, the work location as well as market and business considerations. GEICO will consider sponsoring a new qualified applicant for employment authorization for this position. The GEICO Pledge: Great Company: At GEICO, we help our customers through life’s twists and turns. Our mission is to protect people when they need it most and we’re constantly evolving to stay ahead of their needs. We’re an iconic brand that thrives on innovation, exceeding our customers’ expectations and enabling our collective success. From day one, you’ll take on exciting challenges that help you grow and collaborate with dynamic teams who want to make a positive impact on people’s lives. Great Careers: We offer a career where you can learn, grow, and thrive through personalized development programs, created with your career – and your potential – in mind. You’ll have access to industry leading training, certification assistance, career mentorship and coaching with supportive leaders at all levels. Great Culture: We foster an inclusive culture of shared success, rooted in integrity, a bias for action and a winning mindset. Grounded by our core values, we have an an established culture of caring, inclusion, and belonging, that values different perspectives. Our teams are led by dynamic, multi-faceted teams led by supportive leaders, driven by performance excellence and unified under a shared purpose. As part of our culture, we